Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever Global, speaks during the Climate Summit at the UN headquarters in New York, on Sept. 23, 2014. The one-day summit, convened by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, is expected to galvanize global action on climate change.
Photograph: Niu Xiaolei/Xinhua/Photoshot

Covering UN meetings is not a job for the faint of heart, and this week’s climate summit in New York has been no exception. Two-hour waits for credentials are common. Staffers are plentiful, polite and ineffectual. Barricades, private security forces and squadrons of New York’s finest protect the UN compound on Manhattan’s Upper East Side from unwanted incursions from the world beyond.

The summit itself consists of a series of carefully-scripted speeches from business and political leaders. They mix dire warnings with calls to action. Invariably, we are told, no country, company or NGO can solve the problem on its own; we must all work together. Partnerships are key. Climate is the defining issue of our time. The problem is urgent. The time to act is now. The future depends on us.

It is all depressingly familiar to anyone who has been to Durban, Cancun or Copenhagen for summits past.

“You can make history or be vilified by it,” says the newly appointed UN Messenger of Peace on Climate Change, as the official proceedings began on Tuesday. Why, it’s Leonardo DiCaprio of Titanic fame, who knows a disaster in the making when he sees one.

No need to worry, Leo. Upbeat headlines abound.

Global business leaders take strong stand for carbon pricing.

New Energy Efficiency Commitments Aim to Double Efficiency of New Vehicles by 2030 & Save More Than 1 Gigaton of CO2 Emissions by 2025.

The state of that Green Climate Fund today? Until a week or so ago, countries had committed a mere $55m — that’s million, not billion. Last week, Germany promised another $960m, and at the summit pledges came from France ($1bn), South Korea ($100m), Switzerland ($100m), Denmark ($70m) and Norway ($33m). Do the math, and the total pledged to the fund to date is about $2.3bn. Good, but a far cry from $100bn.

Business, meantime, was given a more prominent role than ever at this year’s confab. The chairman or chief executives of IKEA, Saudi Aramco, GDF Suez, State Grid Corporation of China, SINOPEC, Zenith Bank, HESTA, Bank of America, Cargill, Unilever, Statoil, Veolia, BYD, McDonald’s, Walmart, Enel, ABB and Swiss Re each got the 10 or 15 minutes of fame.

IKEA and Mars reiterated pledges to power their companies with 100% renewable energy. Six global oil and gas companies promised to cut methane emissions in fossil fuel productions. Food and agriculture firms agreed not to source products palm oil, soy or soy-feed beef, from land where forests have been illegally cut. (Deforestation is a big contributor to global warming.)

All this is to say, the summit is not without encouraging declarations. But the inclination to grandstand might outstrip any tangible action. Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, used his podium to speculate grandly about the summit’s place in history:

Historians may one day refer to our meeting today as the beginning of a new period of economic thinking where we internalize externality costs into our behavior as governments, as business, as cities, and as citizens.

Lamentably, the rhetoric is belied by the facts on the ground. Greenhouse gas emissions are steadily rising. So are atmospheric concentrations of CO2. Stabilizing or reversing those trends will be extremely difficult for a couple of reasons — the existing stock of fossil fuel plants, the fact that 1 billion people in the world still lack electricity and the persistence of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Consider, as evidence, a recent study from UC Irvine earth scientist Steven Davis and Princeton physicist Robert Socolow counting what they call “committed emissions,” by which they mean the carbon pollution that existing power plants will generate over their lifetimes. Those emissions, too, are growing, by about 4 percent a year, as new coal, oil and natural gas plants are built, particularly in China and India.

Bringing down those committed emissions would require closing down more fossil plants than are built. But just the opposite is happening.

“Worldwide, we’ve built more coal-burning power plants in the past decade than in any previous decade, and closures of old plants aren’t keeping pace,” says Davis. “Far from solving the climate change problem, we’re investing heavily in technologies that make the problem worse.”

Says Socolow: ”We’ve been hiding what’s going on from ourselves: A high-carbon future is being locked in by the world’s capital investments.”

Without getting inside their heads, it’s impossible to know if the business executives and political leaders at the UN summit are fooling themselves. Probably not. It’s likely that, with the exception of the fossil fuel industry, they are (like the rest of us) doing what they believe to be the best they can to deal with a terribly vexing problem.

And if they’re paying attention to the world outside the UN walls, they know they aren’t doing enough. Not even close.

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